Thursday, November 22, 2012

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For Better or For Worse: So Very Thankful for the Laughter

On Thanksgiving Day, like most people, I am counting my blessings and am especially thinking about everything I have to be grateful for. Of course, I am thankful for my husband, my 3 beautiful children, my family, everyone being in good health overall, having a roof over our heads and food on our table, and all the friends I have made online through blogging. Another thing I am grateful for is having the ability to laugh, which my husband is in part largely responsible for. Many times, I am so busy and under so much stress that I rarely stop to have fun anymore. There are some rare moments when I do laugh uncontrollably and the release feels so good. The other night, I experienced one of those moments . . .

The children have been behaving extra "special" lately. This seems to happen every year before Christmas. It's almost like they are trying to test whether Santa is really watching them or not. My husband and I were talking about how each child is so predictable in how they react to our calling them, our asking them to do things, and so forth. For example, our oldest will just say "What?" when we call him. If he doesn't hear what we say, he just goes on with whatever he was doing without making any effort to find out what we wanted. So, my husband yelled upstairs to our 3 children and mumbled some nonsense words. He even repeated the words a few times. We got a few whats in response, but only our daughter actually came down to find out what we wanted. It made my husband and I laugh to see how predictable their responses were.

Then I told my husband that I've always thought about just starting to count, like we do when we want our children to do something quickly. Usually I tell the children that they have until I count to a certain number to complete the task or else they would receive a specific punishment. My husband agreed that this would be extremely funny, so he started to count loudly. Only our oldest panicked because he did not know what we wanted, did not know what number his father would be counting to, and did not know what the punishment would be. Out of all 3 children, he was the only one who ran downstairs to find out what he was supposed to do to avoid a punishment. I was laughing uncontrollably and had to hide behind my laptop to avoid letting my son know that it was a trick.

That was my long way of saying thank you to my husband for the good times and laughter.